Pardon Our Dust (Update: Comments Are Back)

Posted on Mar 10, 2010

Update: We are go. Truthdig is now a lot faster, comments are back on and we thank you all for your patience. Have anything to say about the new setup or bugs to report? Drop us a line in the comments of this entry or via our feedback form. A lengthier explanation after the jump.

We’re sorry we couldn’t give advanced warning about the switchover. We had been taking steps to speed up our site, but we were blindsided by a crush of traffic and problems with the servers at the same time. Disabling comments was one of several emergency measures to reduce the strain on the old servers. It took us longer than expected to get the new infrastructure up and running. During that time, we tried re-enabling comments and, in the words of one of our developers, “that didn’t go so well.” The moment the new servers took over and checked out, we turned comments back on. This is all a long way of saying there was no conspiracy or censorship. In fact, we love our commenters and want more, more, more.

Thanks again for your patience and enjoy the new faster Truthdig. This is just the beginning. We are hard at work on a lot of great improvements to the site that we can’t talk about yet. And if you’re feeling generous, remember you can always help us bring you more by donating here.

Original post follows…

Note to our readers: We are upgrading our servers in order to bring you a better, faster Truthdig experience. Unfortunately, we’ve had to disable comments temporarily while we work out some technical glitches. If you’ve left a comment and don’t see it, don’t worry. It will be posted eventually. Thanks for your patience. (Update: Comments should be back up by the weekend.)

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New and Improved Comments

We are launching a major overhaul of our comments section.

In addition to more robust spam filtering and moderation, new features include the ability to rate other comments, sort how they are displayed and respond directly via e-mail or in a thread.

Unfortunately, commenters will lose their existing Truthdig identities. It's a pain, we know, but on the plus side you will now be able to log in with a plethora of options, including Google, Twitter, Facebook and Disqus accounts.

Before launching this system we spent months in discussion with our top commenters. We listened to the feedback and we hope you like what we've come up with.

Please direct any problems or concerns to us via our contact page.